14 October 2026 Current Affairs: Headlines, GK & MCQs

The Finance Minister announced Sovereign Green Bonds in the Union Budget speech of 1 February 2022, as part of the government's overall market borrowing.

When blood glucose is more than the body needs, the hormone insulin helps convert it into glycogen, which is stored mainly in the liver and the muscles.

Burning coal, petrol and diesel releases oxides of sulphur and nitrogen (and carbon), which dissolve in rain water to form acids.

Holothuria, the sea cucumber, is an echinoderm, a non-chordate group, so it never has a notochord at any stage of life.

The breakdown of glucose into pyruvate, called glycolysis, takes place in the cytoplasm (cytosol) of the cell. Glycolysis is the first step of respiration in almost every living cell.

On 13 April 1919 troops fired without any warning on an unarmed crowd in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, on the orders of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer.

In photosynthesis, green plants take carbon dioxide from the air and combine it with water, using sunlight, to make carbohydrates such as glucose.

JP argued for a "partyless democracy" in which representatives would be chosen by the people directly, without competing political parties.

Biogas is mostly methane, usually about 50 to 75 percent, and it is the methane that burns with a clean blue flame and no smoke.

Gold is a noble metal at the bottom of the reactivity series, so it does not react with oxygen, water or ordinary acids.

After fertilisation, each ovule grows into a seed, and the ovary that holds the ovules grows into the fruit. In flowering plants, a pollen tube carries two male gametes to the ovule.

The Election Commission first used VVPAT machines with EVMs in the by-election to Noksen in Tuensang district, Nagaland, in September 2013.

Insulin is a protein (peptide) hormone made in the human body by the beta cells of the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.

Article 263 lets the President set up an Inter-State Council by order whenever it appears that public interest would be served by it.

The Code on Wages, 2019 was passed by Parliament, received the President's assent and was notified in the Gazette of India on 8 August 2019.

The order is plasmid (1952), DNA double helix (1953), DNA fingerprinting (1984) and the cloning of Dolly (1996). Joshua Lederberg coined the word "plasmid" in 1952 for genetic material that lives outside the chromosome; plasmids later became the main vectors of genetic engineering.

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in refrigerators, air conditioners, aerosol sprays and foams were the main cause of ozone depletion in the twentieth century.

Sodium reacts vigorously with cold water to form sodium hydroxide and hydrogen gas: 2Na + 2H₂O → 2NaOH + H₂.

In aerobic tissues, where oxygen is available, glucose is broken down completely into carbon dioxide, water and energy. Aerobic respiration begins with glycolysis in the cytoplasm, which gives pyruvate.

The Indigo Revolt (1859–60) of Bengal's peasants against European indigo planters won strong support from the Bengali intelligentsia, press and missionaries.

Lord Curzon's partition of Bengal came into effect on 16 October 1905, years before the other three events. Curzon announced the partition in July 1905, claiming it was for administrative convenience, but it was widely seen as a way to divide Hindus and Muslims and weaken Bengali nationalism.

The CAG audits spending from the Consolidated Fund and of bodies substantially financed by government, but has no control over the release of money from the fund.

A large part of the energy is lost at every trophic level, so after four or five links too little is left to support another level.

A freely falling object moves with a uniform acceleration, the acceleration due to gravity, g, about 9.8 m/s² near the Earth's surface.

Reducing manganese dioxide with aluminium, 3MnO₂ + 4Al → 3Mn + 2Al₂O₃, gives out a large amount of heat. This method of reducing a metal oxide with aluminium powder is called aluminothermy, or the Goldschmidt thermite process.

In May 2020 Sania Mirza won the Fed Cup Heart Award for the Asia/Oceania zone, becoming the first Indian to receive it.

The Telugu poet K. Siva Reddy received the Saraswati Samman for 2018 for his poetry collection "Pakkaki Ottigilite".

Cape Town, Los Angeles, Adelaide and Santiago all lie in the Mediterranean climate belt on the western sides of continents, roughly between 30° and 40° latitude.

The Teesta flows from Sikkim through West Bengal into Bangladesh and joins the Brahmaputra, so it has nothing to do with the Indus system.

Article 269A makes inter-State GST a tax that only the Centre levies and collects and then shares with the States.

Twenty crests and twenty troughs make twenty complete waves in 0.1 second, so the frequency is 200 Hz and the wavelength is 330 ÷ 200 = 1.65 m. One complete wave, or one cycle, contains one crest and one trough (for sound, one compression and one rarefaction).

Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, stands on the Vltava river, not on the Danube. The Danube is Europe's second-longest river after the Volga.

Photo 51 is the X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA that revealed its helical shape. The picture was taken in May 1952 at King's College London by Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling.

A bacterium is a prokaryote, so its DNA lies in an irregular region called the nucleoid, with no nuclear membrane around it.

Velocity multiplied by time is displacement, so the area between a velocity-time graph and the time axis gives the displacement.

Silver and copper are the two best conductors of heat among metals. Metals conduct heat because their free electrons carry energy quickly through the solid.

Cyclohexane, C 6 H 12, has 6 C–C single bonds and 12 C–H single bonds, 18 single bonds in all and no double or triple bond.

In ecology, a population is defined by three things together: one species, one place and one time. Ecology studies life in levels.

India marks 21 May as Anti-Terrorism Day because former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated on that day in 1991.

The British settlement in Awadh treated the talukdars as intruders who had gained land by force and fraud. After Awadh was annexed in 1856, the British introduced the Summary Settlement of land revenue there.

The great majority of plant viruses carry their genes as single-stranded RNA. Viruses contain either DNA or RNA, never both, wrapped in a protein coat.

Carbon monoxide binds with haemoglobin far more strongly than oxygen does, so the blood can no longer carry enough oxygen.

The State Election Commission directs the preparation of electoral rolls for panchayat elections, but the State Election Commissioner is appointed by the Governor, not on the Chief Election Commissioner's advice.

Fourth-generation computers, from about 1971, were built around the microprocessor, a whole CPU on a single chip. Computer generations are named after the main switching technology of the time.

X-rays are electromagnetic waves made of uncharged photons, so electric and magnetic fields cannot bend them. Electric and magnetic fields exert force only on charged particles: a charge q feels a force qE in an electric field and qvB in a magnetic field.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is a Polynesian island in the south-eastern Pacific that has belonged to Chile since 1888.

The Higgs boson found at CERN in 2012 has a mass of about 125 GeV, which among the given options is closest to 100 GeV.

Power is the reciprocal of focal length in metres, and 10 cm is 0.1 m, so P = 1 ÷ 0.1 = 10 D. The power of a lens measures how strongly it converges or diverges light.

Metals produce a ringing sound when struck, a property called sonority, which is why bells are made of metal. Sonorous means 'producing a deep, ringing sound'.

The pulmonary veins carry oxygen-rich blood from the lungs into the left atrium. In double circulation, blood passes through the heart twice in each full round.